Supermarket Slaughter

The Blame Game

On the afternoon of May 14th, Payton Gendron, eighteen years old and a self-proclaimed white supremacist, arrived outside a Tops Supermarket located in Buffalo, New York. Armed with an AR-15 type rifle, Gendron began firing off rounds in the parking lot, fatally shooting three shoppers. He then entered the grocery store where his killing spree continued. When all was said and done, Gendron had murdered 10 people and injured three others. Almost all of the victims were African-American.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Gendron had purchased the assault rifle legally from dealers in New York and northern Pennsylvania. Background checks came back negative. Although he had undergone a psychiatric evaluation in 2021 after submitting a high school project in which he threatened to commit a murder-suicide at a high school, his actions did not trigger New York’s Red-Flag law which prevents anyone who shows signs of being a threat to themselves or others from purchasing a firearm.

In this Episode of The Blame Game, we try to answer the question of, who, if anyone, is to blame for this shooting and the resulting tragic loss of life? Who, if anyone, is legally responsible for the murders that were committed inside the Tops supermarket? And to help us answer these questions, we turn to the Dunleavy in Kramer, Dunleavy & Ratchik, Denise Dunleavy. In 1999, Ms. Dunleavy received the Trial Lawyer of the Year award from Trial Lawyers for Public Justice for her work against the gun industry. In her precedent-setting victory in Hamilton v. Accu-Tek, she convinced a jury to hold gun manufacturers liable for negligently marketing and distributing handguns in the New York City area.

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